Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Wednesday he opposes using the
Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty military forces to American
cities to quell riots and protests.

In a press conference at the Pentagon, Mr. Esper said the use of
active-duty troops should be a “last resort” for the country, and he
does not believe such a course is necessary or appropriate right now.

President Trump earlier this week threatened to invoke the 1807 law if
governors do not activate National Guard forces to control crowds and
stop widespread looting. Protests have gripped much of the country
following last week’s death of George Floyd, a black man, during a
confrontation with Minneapolis police.

Protesters defied curfews across the United States as leaders scrambled
to stem anger over police racism while President Donald Trump rejected
criticism over his use of force to break up a peaceful rally.

Standoffs between police and demonstrators stretched into the night in
cities from New York to Los Angeles over the death of George Floyd, an
unarmed African-American man whose killing has brought
once-in-a-generation protests to the nation for the past week.

But there were fewer reports of the looting and violence that had soured street demonstrations in previous nights.

Rod Rosenstein: Carter Page FISA warrants seemed 'justified' at the time
Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will tell senators on
Wednesday that he approved the now-suspect surveillance applications
for ex-Trump campaign aide Carter Page because it looked proper at the
time, and he didn’t know the bureau had ignored its own policies to
justify the warrant.

Mr. Rosenstein, in testimony prepared for delivery to the Senate
Judiciary Committee, also defended his decision to name a special
counsel, Robert Mueller, to probe Russian activities during the 2016
election, saying at that point early in the Trump administration there
just weren’t many confirmed U.S. attorneys who could have done the
investigation.

Mr. Rosenstein, who served from the early days of the Trump
administration until May 2019, was a key figure in overseeing that
probe, which was charged with investigating whether anyone on President
Trump’s team was conspiring with Russian operatives. The investigation
found no conclusive evidence of such a conspiracy.

“For peaceful demonstrators to make way — make way for the president to
walk through … what is this, a banana republic?” Mrs. Pelosi,
California Democrat, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Law enforcement had cleared protesters near the White House on Monday
as Mr. Trump was preparing to deliver a Rose Garden speech on the
ongoing unrest in the country after the killing of George Floyd in the
custody of Minneapolis police on Memorial Day.

"Governor Cooper is still in Shelter-In-Place Mode, and not allowing us
to occupy the arena as originally anticipated and promised," Trump
tweeted shortly after 9 p.m. "We are now forced to seek another State
to host the 2020 Republican National Convention."

Republican Party Chair Ronna McDaniel had said earlier in the day that
the party would begin exploring options outside of North Carolina.

President Trump’s idea to deploy active-duty military forces to quell
increasingly violent riots in cities across the country has sparked a
sharp legal and constitutional clash.

But an even more explosive debate has broken out on a question once
believed unthinkable: Should — and will — rank-and-file troops obey the
commander in chief if they are ordered to round up American citizens on
the streets of New York, Louisville or Chicago?

Some prominent veterans and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are calling on
service members to “lay down your arms” and defy Mr. Trump’s orders
should he invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act and seek to move tanks and
personnel to major metropolitan areas as civil unrest grows after the
Memorial Day death of George Floyd during a confrontation with
Minneapolis police.

It has been six years since the Ferguson riots put a microscope on
relations between police and black communities, and despite dozens of
studies on the matter, researchers say they are no closer to a
consensus on the role that bias and racism play.

It turns out there is not good enough data to be able to draw firm
conclusions, leaving a chaotic landscape of competing conclusions.

One paper saying black unarmed civilians are 3.5 times more likely than
whites to be shot by police is stacked up against a competing study
arguing that once factors are controlled, there are no racial
differences in police shootings.

Throughout January, the World Health Organization publicly praised
China for what it called a speedy response to the new coronavirus and
thanked the Chinese government for sharing the genetic map of the virus
“immediately.”

But in fact, Chinese officials sat on releasing the genetic map, or
genome, of the deadly virus for over a week after multiple government
labs had fully decoded it, not sharing details key to designing tests,
drugs and vaccines. Strict controls on information and competition
within the Chinese public health system were largely to blame, The
Associated Press has found from internal documents, emails and dozens
of interviews.

Health officials only released the genome after a Chinese lab published
it ahead of authorities on a virology website on Jan 11. Even then,
China stalled for at least two weeks more on giving WHO the details it
needed, according to recordings of multiple internal meetings held by
the U.N. health agency in January — all at a time when the outbreak
arguably might have been dramatically slowed.

Courtesy of our educational infrastructure having been transformed into
leftist indoctrination centers, the result is politicians who care only
about ideology where citizens are collateral damage in their march
toward a leftist utopia.

Our media is populated with news-actors who are similarly bound to
their teachers’ idols of social justice, political correctness and
identity politics. All of our institutions are suffering from the twin
masters of identity politics and woke philosophy.

In New York City during the riots, two individuals were arrested for
attempting to bomb a marked New York Police Department cruiser with a
Molotov cocktail. Upon arrest, police found additional material in the
car to make more Molotov cocktails, and the booking complaint alleges
they intended to hand out the bombs to other rioters.

If you wrote a screenplay of what’s happened so far in 2020 and gave it
to Hollywood producers, they’d laugh you right out of the room.

“So, your movie,” they’d say, “has the president of the United States
being impeached, a pandemic killing more than 100,000 Americans and
375,000 worldwide, race riots and looting in dozens of U.S. cities, a
billion animals killed in Australian wildfires, Brexit, royals
abdicating, drone strikes whacking terrorists — and a wave of killer
hornets to boot? Get out!”

" It is discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit."-- Noel Coward (1899-1973) British playwright

Medal of Honor

The
Medal of Honor is the highest award for valor in action against an
enemy force which can be bestowed upon an individual serving in the
Armed Services of the United States.
GeneTrerally
presented to its recipient by the President of the United States of
America in the name of Congress.
The first award of
the Medal of Honor was made March 25, 1863 to Private JACOB PARROTT.The
last award of the Medal of Honor was made September 15, 2011 to
Sergeant DAKOTA MEYER.

Since then there have been: • 3458 recipients of the Medal of Honor.
• Today there are 85 Living Recipients of the Medal of Honor.

Citation

Captain
Humbert R. Versace distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism
during the period of 29 October 1963 to 26 September 1965, while
serving as S-2 Advisor, Military Assistance Advisory Group, Detachment
52, Ca Mau, Republic of Vietnam. While accompanying a Civilian
Irregular Defense Group patrol engaged in combat operations in Thoi
Binh District, An Xuyen Province, Captain Versace and the patrol came
under sudden and intense mortar, automatic weapons, and small arms fire
from elements of a heavily armed enemy battalion. As the battle raged,
Captain Versace, although severely wounded in the knee and back by
hostile fire, fought valiantly and continued to engage enemy targets.
Weakened by his wounds and fatigued by the fierce firefight, Captain
Versace stubbornly resisted capture by the over-powering Viet Cong
force with the last full measure of his strength and ammunition. Taken
prisoner by the Viet Cong, he exemplified the tenets of the Code of
Conduct from the time he entered into Prisoner of War status. Captain
Versace assumed command of his fellow American soldiers, scorned the
enemy's exhaustive interrogation and indoctrination efforts, and made
three unsuccessful attempts to escape, despite his weakened condition
which was brought about by his wounds and the extreme privation and
hardships he was forced to endure. During his captivity, Captain
Versace was segregated in an isolated prisoner of war cage, manacled in
irons for prolonged periods of time, and placed on extremely reduced
ration. The enemy was unable to break his indomitable will, his faith
in God, and his trust in the United States of America. Captain Versace,
an American fighting man who epitomized the principles of his country
and the Code of Conduct, was executed by the Viet Cong on 26 September
1965. Captain Versace's gallant actions in close contact with an enemy
force and unyielding courage and bravery while a prisoner of war are in
the highest traditions of the military service and reflect the utmost
credit upon himself and the United States Army.

From the Archives

We Have Met the Enemy…Geoff Metcalf

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.--Benjamin Franklin“The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security.” --Louis Freeh

In
the wake of the clamor over the most recent WikiLeaks data dump, ‘Vault
7’, ‘UMBRAGE’, et al, it should be noted this is not really anything
new. What we are seeing here is simply the evolution of something that
goes back to the late 50s (to the incomplete best knowledge I have).

In April of 1998 I wrote
“Privacy has become an anachronism.” I was commenting on “a massive
system designed to intercept all your e-mail, fax traffic and more.” I
was explaining ‘Echelon’, the illegitimate offspring of a UKUSA Treaty signed by the United
States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Its purpose
was, and is, to have a vast global intelligence monster, which
allegedly shares common goals. The system was so “efficient” that
reportedly National Security Agency folk from Fort Meade could work
from Menwith Hill in England to intercept local communications without
either nation having to burden themselves with the formality of seeking
approval (a court order) or disclosing the operation. And this was all
pre-9/11 and pre-the anti-constitutional 'Patriot Act'.

It is
illegal (without a Judge’s signed permission) for the United States to
spy on its citizens … kinda. The laws have long been circumvented by a
mutual pact among five nations. Under the terms of UKUSA agreement,
Britain spies on Americans and America spies on British citizens, and
then the two conspirators trade data. A classic technical finesse. It
is legal, but the intent to evade the spirit is inescapable.

I
often fictionalized the genesis of ‘Echelon’ as an informal meeting of
a group of post war American and British intelligence types drinking in
some remote rustic bar. An imagined CIA type complains to his MI6 buddy
about the hassles of US laws preventing US intelligence from
surveillance of bad guys, and the Brit echoes the same complaint.

“Hey wait a moment mate,” says Nigel, the make-believe MI6 guy, “I can
spy on your guys and you can spy on our bad players…why don’t we just
come up with a mechanism whereby we spy on your villains, you spy on
our villains, and we just ‘share’ the intel?”

This system was
called ECHELON, and has been kicking around in some form longer than
most of you. The result of the UKUSA treaty signed by the United
States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand was, and is,
to have a vast global intelligence monster which allegedly shares
common goals.

The London Telegraph reported in December of
1997 that the Civil liberties Committee of the European Parliament had
officially confirmed the existence and purpose of ECHELON. “A global
electronic spy network that can eavesdrop on every telephone, e-mail
and telex communication around the world will be officially
acknowledged for the first time in a European Commission report. …”

The report noted: “Within Europe all e-mail, telephone and fax
communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National
Security Agency, transferring ll target information from the Eurv opean
mainland via the strategic hub of London, then by satellite to Fort
Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill, in the North
York moors in the UK.

“The ECHELON system forms part of the
UKUSA system but unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed
during the Cold War, ECHELON was designed primarily for non-military
targets: governments, organizations and businesses in virtually every
country.”

An interesting sidebar appeared in the International
Herald Tribune under the headline, “Big Corporate Brother: It Knows
More About You Than You Think.” The story details Acxiom Corp, which
was a humongous information service hidden in the Ozark foothills.
Twenty-four hours a day, Acxiom electronically gathered and sorts all
kinds of data about 196 million Americans. Credit card transactions and
magazine subscriptions, telephone numbers, real estate records,
automotive data, hunting, business and fishing licenses, consumer
surveys and demographic detail that would make a marketing department’s
research manager salivate. This relatively new (legal) enterprise was
known as “data warehousing” or “data-mining”, and it underscores the
cruel reality that the fiction of personal privacy has become obsolete.
Technology’s ability to collect and analyze data has made privacy a
quaint albeit interesting dinosaur.

The Tribune reported that
“Axciom can often determine whether an American owns a dog or cat,
enjoys camping or gourmet cooking, reads the Bible or lots of other
books. It can often pinpoint an American’s occupation, car and favorite
vacations. By analyzing the equivalent of billions of pages of data, it
often projects for its customers who should be offered a credit card or
who is likely to buy a computer.”

Most of this information is
from y 1998 piece. Echelon has developed, matured, and morphed
into a much more powerful hybrid. ‘Carnivore’ was software to help
triage the cacophony of data. Vault 7 and ‘Umbrage’ are logical (some
would argue “insidious”) growth.